Parallel Careers: Recent Episodes
Claire Tacon
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development. The podcast features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
“It's essential when we're writing non-fiction for it to be non-fiction. My experience has always been that fking with the facts fks with the emotion. And so sometimes it's because you think that fudging the facts will get you to the truth faster, or will get you to the emotion faster. But often what it gets you to is a surface emotion. False facts get you to false emotion. So sticking with the facts, trying to work your way on the page with the messiness of human experience brings more nuance to that emotional truth that you're trying to get at.”
In this episode, Kim Pittaway shares strategies for writing non-fiction with emotional depth and why it’s essential for writers to learn how the publishing business works.
She discusses:
0:00 | How mentoring should equip students with their own compasses
0:40 | Her work as Executive Director of the creative nonfiction program at University of King's College and the importance of learning the business side of writing alongside the craft
3:19 | Working with Toufah Jallow on her memoir Toufah: The Woman Who Inspired an African #MeToo Movement
9:20 | Developing the “idea plot” alongside the narrative drive of a creative nonfiction piece
12:15 | The challenge of interviewing people about traumatic events and the best practices she’s developed over her career
15:24 | Working through a shift in perspective when encountering an emotional gap in a piece
18:30 | Her essay, “After” and challenging conventional reporting on sexual violence
22:50 | Getting to nuanced, emotional truths when writing non-fiction
Kim Pittaway is a cohort director in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King's College in Halifax, NS. She is an award-winning journalist with publication and broadcast credits that include Hazlitt, Chatelaine, Reader’s Digest, More Magazine, Best Health, Cottage Life, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, CBC Radio’s The Current, Tapestry, and others. She is a recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Canadian National Magazine Awards Foundation (and an 8-time NMAF finalist), a co-winner of a Canadian Science Writers’ Association Award with her sister the journalist Tina Pittaway, and a finalist for the American Society of Journalists and Authors service writing award. She spent a decade working with a wide range of magazine and NGO clients developing online editorial strategies and content. She is the author, with Toufah Jallow, of Toufah: The Woman Who Inspired an African #MeToo Movement. She is also at work on a memoir with the working title Grudge: What We Learn from What We Can't Forgive. Check out her website.
You can find Kim’s work here:
Toufah: The Woman Who Inspired an African #MeToo Movement
After
The music you heard on this episode was composed by Amadeo Ventura. You can hear more of his music at amadeoventura.weebly.com.
Visit TNQ.ca to access more of Kim Pittaway’s writing and teaching tips, including web extras about giving feedback and her forthcoming memoir on forgiveness.
If you like our podcast, please leave a review—it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!
Reading recommendations:
The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fiction for a New Era, by Harold R. Johnson
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos
Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann ni Ghriofa
Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz
They Said This Would be Fun by Eternity Martis
How to Read Now: Essays by Elaine Castillo
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
“What I tell my students is that, you know, when they publish someday and work with an editor, it'll be a breeze. Because if you spent two years or more workshopping your work creatively, where you've got 20 people telling you their opinions about it and what they like about it, what they didn't like about it—that's far harder. What they're doing in, in a creative writing class is far harder than working with an editor later, where you're just getting one person's opinion. And I tell them, at this point, I'm like, if somebody has a piece of advice that will make this thing better, I'm taking it. I don't have any anxiety over influence or anything like that.”
In this episode, Wayde Compton shares how he challenges conventional narrative structures and explains why it’s worth following your own particularities as a writer.
He discusses:
0:54 | How working with Betsy Warland shaped his own thinking about teaching creative writing and the importance of fostering connections between students
2:37 | Reading reference books as a child and how it influenced the development of his story collection The Outer Harbour
8:26 | His book of essays After Canaan and his work on preserving the memory of Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver
13:38 | Why having a “writing buddy” is more valuable, in the long run, than having a mentor
14:46 | Exploring woodworking through haptics and creating tactile art that complements his writing projects
17:03 | How you never know how people are going to receive your work or how it's going to be useful to them
21:33 | An exercise inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s work where he asks students to start a fiction project by drawing a map
Guest bio:
Wayde Compton is the author of four books: 49th Parallel Psalm (finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize); Performance Bond; After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award); and The Outer Harbour (winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award). He has also edited two anthologies: Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature and The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award). Compton is a co-founder of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, an organization formed to raise awareness about the history of Vancouver’s Black community. He lives in Vancouver and has recently joined the faculty of Creative Writing at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC.
The music you heard on this episode was composed by Amadeo Ventura. You can hear more of his music at amadeoventura.weebly.com.
Visit TNQ.ca to access more of Wayde Compton’s writing and teaching tips, including web extras about reading local work and the importance of “finding your urgency.”
If you like our podcast, please leave a review—it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!
You can find Wayde’s work here:
The Outer Harbour
After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region
Performance Bond; After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region
49th Parallel Psalm
Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature
The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them
The Blue Road
“I always say that I learned to be a writer by teaching. I didn't take a creative writing course in high school. I didn't take any creative writing courses in university. I really credit teaching writing with my knowledge of writing, which seems kind of backward, but having to understand writing enough to teach it, I felt like I knew enough about the writing process when I started writing Kings, Queens and In-Betweens enough to get something down on paper.”
In this episode, Tanya Boteju shares her thoughts on writing for Young Adult audiences and how teaching writing equipped her with the skills to become a writer herself.
She discusses:
1:09 | the importance of free-writing—how it’s informed her own practice and how she scaffolds the writing process for her students
3:34 | writing a book about joy and possibility set in the drag community in Kings, Queens and In-Betweens
7:57 | inviting previous students to be beta readers for both of her books (and getting feedback in emoji form)
9:31 | challenging ideas about strength in her second book, Bruised, and writing queer stories that move beyond coming-out narratives
15:54 | how writing in first-person to help you discover more about your characters and the unexpected details that can emerge from that
17:57 | balancing writing and teaching and being intentional with writing, even when you only have small chunks of time
Guest bio:
Tanya Boteju is an English teacher and writer living on unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (Vancouver, Canada).
Tanya is grateful for her patient wife, supportive family and friends, committed educators, sassy students, and hot mugs of tea. In both teaching and writing, she is committed to positive, diverse representation.
About the podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
The music you heard on this episode was composed by Amadeo Ventura. You can hear more of his music at amadeoventura.weebly.com.
Visit TNQ.ca to access more of Tanya Boteju’s writing and teaching tips, including web extras about professional development and figurative language.
If you like our podcast, please leave a review—it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!
You can find Tanya’s work here:
Bruised
Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens
Out Now edited by Saundra Mitchell
Recommended reading:
In the Key of Dale by Benjamin Lefebvre
Boys and Girls Screaming by Kern Carter
A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo
The Misewa Series by David A Robertson
“I certainly see the plasticity and the infinite possibilities there are within language as a way to expand the limits of the, the quote unquote world and a way to dream of another world where liberation is possible. And to try and, in some way, approach it in language as a way of possibly immanentizing it. Some people might think that's sort of anarchical or utopian, but I think that one needs the audacity to be able to dream of these things. And that is what I'm trying to do in language.”
In this episode, Liz Howard shares her thoughts on the expansiveness of poetry and how it can be used as a tool for exploration, experimentation and interpretation:
She discusses:
1:22 | how an old copy of Macbeth entrained her ear to the rhythm of language
3:47 | coming to see her writing as a conversation with the ancestral realm
5:00 | using enjambment to interrupt anecdotal poems in her first collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, inviting the reader to pay closer attention
9:12 | invoking both Western astrophysical science and cosmology, as well as Indigenous, specifically Anishinaabe, sky knowledgein Letters in a Bruised Cosmos
11:14 | scavenging and thrifting language to produce a sort of haunting or a kind of echo within the text and how that resonates with her work in cognitive psychology
16:16 | adapting one of Dionne Brand’s writing exercises in her own classroom, inviting students to consider a sight of astonishment, an earliest memory and a moment of self-awareness
19:11 | her work at Inkwell and developing prompts from existing poems to explore situated-ness
Guest Bio:
Liz Howard’s debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for poetry, and was named a Globe and Mail top 100 book. A National Magazine Award finalist, her recent work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Literary Review of Canada, Room Magazine and Best Canadian Poetry 2021. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was published by McClelland & Stewart in June 2021. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at McGill University, University of Calgary, UBC Okanagan, Douglas College, Sheridan College, and The Capilano Review. She is also an adjunct professor and lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and serves on the editorial board for Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak & Wynn. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
“Mostly when I'm teaching, I am trying really hard to get out of the way of the student's own creative process. So I don't want to dictate what students make. I like to give a writing prompt that invites them to source their own material, to give them a degree of choice in how they find what they want to write about. So I trust a lot in the unconscious, that the unconscious is just going to deliver something that has value for them. Because the unconscious doesn't like to waste its time.”
In this episode, Michael V. Smith shares how he brings community-building tools into the academy and how memoir allows a writer to travel through time.
He discusses:
0:55 | the benefits of valuing process over product in writing courses
3:43 | reconciling masculinity while writing My Body Is Yours
6:21 | the difference between the book you intend to write and the book you’ve actually written
8:38 | the impact of the slogan “silence equals death,” and how writing helps keep us alive
13:00 | queering the academy and embodying a brave space in the classroom
16:35 | his oral history project Soundtrack and capturing lived history on a scale that is often erased
22:03 | adapting a Lynda Barry exercise to help students build a setting and generate narrative
Guest bio:
Michael V. Smith is a writer, performer, filmmaker, and Associate Professor teaching Creative Writing in the interdisciplinary department of Creative Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna, BC. Smith is an MFA graduate from UBC’s Creative Writing program.
Smith has won a number of awards for both his writing and his short film work. His novel, Cumberland, was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Smith won the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers. He’s won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Journey Prize.
His videos have played around the world, and he has screened work at the British Film Institute, at the Lincoln Center with the New York Video Festival, and in the Vancouver International Film Festival. As a performer, Smith has played dozens of cabarets and festivals, including the 2011 Performance Studies International Conference in Utrecht, Netherlands, the Vancouver Comedy Festival, and an intervention with the Raumerweiterungshalle, Berlin.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
In this episode, Eufemia Fantetti describes how she approaches teaching with compassion, outlines the challenges of writing about emotional trauma, and shares how she uses humour as a superpower and a shield.
She discusses:
0:52 | teachers who take their frustrations out on students and why it’s important to provide practical tips in every lesson
4:34 | writing food and complicated relationships in her short story collection A Recipe for Disaster and Other Unlikely Tales of Love
8:44 | finding the narrative frame for her memoir My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me and how the “fool’s journey” provided a useful template
11:46 | watching true-crime documentaries during the pandemic and the insights it gave her into writing about family
14:01 | helping students enrich their creative non-fiction by “mapping the personal and charting the global”
17:15 | sharing the Molisan dialect with her father and how her fascination with language led to the anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language
21:14 | working on the Humber Literary Review, imagining rejection as a four-burner oven and embracing writing as a life-long pursuit that you can always improve at
Guest bio:
Eufemia Fantetti is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU and the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing. Her fiction, nonfiction and plays have been published in the anthologies Love Me True, Exploring Voice and Body & Soul. Her work has also appeared in The New Quarterly, Event and the Globe and Mail. She is a winner of the Event Magazine Non-Fiction Contest, and a three-time winner of the annual Accenti Writing Contest. Her work has been nominated for the Creative Nonfiction Collective Readers' Choice Award and was listed as notable in Best American Essays (2009).
Eufemia’s memoir, My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me was released in October 2019 by Mother Tongue Publishing. Her first book, A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love(Mother Tongue, 2013), was runner up for the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, a winner of the 2014 F.G. Bressani Prize.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
"I think it's really important, even if you are not, you know, not gonna be a writer, to still acknowledge that you have right to creative production. There's nothing that says that you have to stop drawing or, or painting after middle school or high school. Celebrate your capacity to make something out of nothing."
In this episode, Ian Williams discusses tackling complicated ethical issues in his writing and finding ways to maintain lifelong creativity.
He discusses:
0:50 | Examining thorny moral and ethical questions through a mathematical model in his poetry collection Word Problems
5:10 | Sticking his poems on the wall and the point in the writing process where he “surrenders to the work,” giving it precedence over the comfort of closure
6:45 | Asking his students to write every day and how he adapts the assignment to different course levels
8:33| His essay collection Disorientation, about what it feels like to be a Black man moving through the world, and writing directly to the reader without the filter of fiction
13:00 | Taking his book draft out to dinner and the importance of recovering joy in the writing process
16:41 | Accruing a character through a repertoire of physical gestures
18:29 | Decentring the “I” by asking students to write an autobiographical poem without any people or pronouns in it
20:20 | Why it’s critical to make plans for our creative lives and how creativity is not a failure because it's a part of your life rather than all of your life
Guest bio:
Ian Williams is the author of six books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His latest book, Disorientation, considers the impact of racial encounters on ordinary people.
His novel, Reproduction, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in Canada, the US, the UK, and Italy. His poetry collection, Word Problems, converts the ethical and political issues of our time into math and grammar problems. It won the Raymond Souster Award. His previous collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Williams completed his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. After several years teaching poetry in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Williams returned to the University of Toronto as a tenured professor of English. He was the 2014-2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program. In 2022, he will be the Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and pract
“The other thing I say in Out of Line after ‘if you don't have community, art will break your heart’ is your heart will be broken anyway, eventually, but it's better with community. You will recover faster and you won't die of heartbreak if you have community.”
In this episode, Tanis MacDonald encourages us to challenge the voices in the canon that do not satisfy, and examines her changing relationship with both walking and art.
She discusses:
1:06 | How poetry attracts people with its strangeness and makes space for two disparate ideas to sit alongside each other.
1:58 | Writing about a female experience of the city in her poetry collection Mobile.
4:40 | Reclaiming the “Crazy Jane” trope and writing about a character who is struggling to leave capitalism and colonialism behind.
7:06 | Considering questions of mobility in her forthcoming book Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female.
11:24 | Being vulnerable with students and using her own work to teach revision strategies.
14:26 | Her book Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City and how to measure success as a writer.
Guest Bio:
Tanis MacDonald is an essayist, poet, professor and free-range literary animal. She is the host of the podcast Watershed Writers, and the author of Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City. Her essay “Mondegreen Girls” won the Open Seasons Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2021. She identifies as a bad birder, and lives near Ose’kowáhne in southwestern Ontario as a grateful guest on traditional Haudenosaunee territory.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
If you like our podcast, please leave a review—it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!
You can find Tanis’s work here:
Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female
Mobile
Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City
GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for our Times
Rue the Day
The music you heard on this episode was composed by Amadeo Ventura. You can hear more of his music at amadeoventura.weebly.com.
Visit TNQ.ca/parallel to access more of Tanis MacDonald’s writing and teaching tips.
“I don't believe that I would be a writer if I wasn’t Deaf. I think that being born deaf kind of derailed me from the kind of path that, that the men in my family tend to take. My dad worked for CN Rail, and my brother worked for CN Rail, and my dad's dad worked for CN Rail. So being Deaf kind of took me away and steered me away from, from that path and down a more artistic and imaginative path.”
In this episode, Adam Pottle shares the importance of believing in the story you want to tell and how creativity is a necessity for a disabled life. He discusses:
- 0:40 | His work as Writer in Residence at Sheridan College and how he hopes it will be an opportunity to encourage more Deaf and disabled writers to tell their stories.
- 1:58 | The development of his first play Ultrasound, and dramaturg Yvette Nolan’s advice to “raise the stakes, raise the stakes, raise the stakes.”
- 5:11 | His research into the Nazi’s T4 Euthanasia program and its victim and his experience touring the clinic described in his book, The Bus.
- 8:15 | The ongoing relevance of The Bus, in an ableist world where eugenicist attitudes still persist.
- 14:58 | His memoir Voice about growing up deaf in a hearing family, and using the persona of Lemmy from Motorhead to bring “color commentary” to the book.
- 17:00 | Asking students to write a paragraph about themselves from the perspective of someone who loves them and the benefits of using this exercise during the pandemic.
- 18: 24 | Developing The Black Drum, a Deaf musical, and how he provided a blueprint for the actors to interpret, creating music out of their own rhythms.
- 20:15 | The windfall awaiting the first major publisher, film studio and art gallery that truly recognizes the potential of disabled artists.
Guest Bio:Adam Pottle's books include the award-winning novels The Bus and Mantis Dreams, along with the critically acclaimed memoir Voice. His plays include the groundbreaking piece The Black Drum, the world's first-ever all-Deaf musical. He is the only Deaf person in a hearing family, and all his work focuses on disabled characters. He is currently working on the script for a new graphic novel while shopping his new novel Apparitions. He lives in Saskatoon.
About the Podcast:Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
If you like our podcast, please leave a review—it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!
Visit TNQ.ca to access more of Adam Pottle’s writing and teaching tips, including web extras about mentorship and cultural appropriation.
You can find Adam’s work here:
Voice. Adam Pottle on Writing with Deafness
The Bus
The Black Drum
Beautiful Mutants
“I think that there's something inspiring to students about knowing that I don't come from an academic background. My career experience in my thirties—I was a waitress and a house cleaner. So I think that that's actually a good balance to have in an institute that teaches something creative.”
In this episode, Ayelet Tsabari discusses writing about contested places, giving voice to her community and how stories can resonate in unexpected ways. She discusses:
- 1:46 | Being Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library and running drop-in workshops for immigrants and people who write in their second language
- 3:41 | Writing place as a mirror of your characters’ emotions
- 6:40 | Getting workshop feedback that confused cultural differences with style, and how she re-discovered her own authorial voice
- 8:30 | Spending a year only reading books by BIPOC writers
- 11:10 | Delving into difficult emotions when writing her memoir The Art of Leaving
- 14:00 | the impossibility of trying to fully capture her grandmother in the text
- 16:55 | Her research into the literary traditions of Yemeni women’s songs
- 20:00 | Helping students re-focus their attention on the world and engage with it
Guest Bio:Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She wrote her first story in English in 2007. She is the author of The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Memoir, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize, finalist for the Vine Awards for Nonfiction, and an Apple Books, CBC Books, and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won both the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016, and has been published internationally. Her translations appeared in the New Quarterly, Berlin Quarterly, Paper Brigade, and Mantis. She teaches creative writing at The University of King’s College MFA, the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA, and at Tel Aviv University. She lives in Toronto.
About the Podcast:Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
If you like our podcast, please leave a review—it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!
Visit TNQ.ca to access more of Ayelet’s writing and teaching tips, including web extras about the vulnerability required by creative non-fiction, and her new anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language.
You can find Ayelet’s work here:
The Art of Leaving
The Best Place on Earth
Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language
Recommended reading: The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
Meander Spiral Explode by Jane Allison
“You want to be continually energized by your students. And that's really the dance of mentorship. And that's the gift of mentorship, is that when you finally get an afternoon to return to your own work, you're going with that hunger that they showed you all the time.”
In this episode, Richard Van Camp discusses his life’s work as a storyteller and writer to pass on teachings for the next generation, and his excitement about the future of Indigenous literature.
- 0:29 | Realizing as a child that the school curriculum he was learning was cultural theft and how it inspired him to interview Elders and write down their knowledge for future generations
- 4:27 | Becoming the Handibus driver in his community and recording community matriarchs
- 5:00 | Studying Native Management Studies at Arctic College and making the choice to pursue writing over politics
- 8:39 | Getting to meet author and Sahtu Dene Elder George Blondin
- 11: 23 | How he’s carried Maureen Medved’s advice on teaching into his work with the Audible mentorship program
- 13:26 | Why he encourages his students to “write for revenge”
- 15:25 | Recording Elders in Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan and the teaching he learned from James Grandjambe
- 22:55 | Developing Gather: Richard Van Camp on Storytelling and sharing interviews from Elders who have passed with their living descendants
- 25:25 | How seeing a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug completely changed the storyline in his book When We Play Our Drums, They Sing!
- 30:46 | Ending in the splits
Guest Bio:
Richard Van Camp is a proud member of the Dogrib (Tłıcho) Nation from Fort Smith, NWT, Canada. He is a graduate of the En’owkin International School of Writing, the University of Victoria’s Creative Writing BFA Program, and the Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is an internationally renowned storyteller and best-selling author. His novel, The Lesser Blessed, is now a movie with First Generation Films and premiered in September of 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival. He is the author of five collections of short stories, six baby books, three children’s books, five comics and much more.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more free writing and teaching tips from Richard Van Camp at: tnq.ca/parallel
You can find Richard’s work here:Gather: Richard Van Camp on Storytelling
The Lesser Blessed
Angel Wing Splash Pattern
Moccasin Square Gardens
We Sang You Home
“I think I was a bad writer before I discovered that I could use humor effectively and that I could use it at all. Being able to crack into just something and use humor kind of broke open a little bit of a creative gate that was really holding me back.”
In this episode, Dina Del Bucchia discusses developing her own comedic voice outside an academic setting and bringing humour to cultural critique. She discusses:
- 1:39 | Marrying humour to the emotional core of the story
- 3:15 | Encouraging students to write comedy that “punches up” in her introduction to comedic forms class
- 6:09 | How seeing Wooly Mammoth skeletons at Whitehorse’s Beringia Interpretive Centre inspired her to write her collection “It's a Big Deal!”
- 8:44 | Writing about class from a working class perspective, and selling $40 business books that will never be released in paperback
- 12:43 | Her story collection “Don’t Tell Me What to Do” and writing women’s anger
- 15:20 | Getting students to write song lyrics in class and the unexpected pandemic content it produced
- 18:22 | Hosting the podcast Can’t Lit and giving a platform to writers from smaller presses
Guest Bio:
Dina Del Bucchia is the author of three collections of poetry, Coping with Emotions and Otters (Talonbooks, 2013), Blind Items (Insomniac Press, 2014), and Rom Com (Talonbooks, 2015), written with Daniel Zomparelli. She also hosts Can’t Lit, a podcast on Canadian literature and culture, with Jen Sookfong Lee. Her short story, "Under the 'I'," was a finalist for the Writers' Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award in 2012. Her first collection of short stories, Don’t Tell Me What to Do, was published in fall 2017 with Arsenal Pulp Press. She is a senior editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine and is the Artistic Director of the Real Vancouver Writers' Series. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she currently is an instructor.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more free writing and teaching tips from Dina Del Bucchia at:
tnq.ca/parallel
You can find Dina’s work here:
It’s a Big Deal!
Don't Tell Me What to Do
Rom Com
Blind Items
Coping with Emotions and Otters
"Writing's my playground. So I feel very free. I feel, you know, we're in a world where there's not a lot of freedom. I feel like I'm free on the page."
In this episode, Carrianne Leung challenges established ideas about craft and teaching, and shares how her writing aims to show the complexity and fullness of being human. She discusses:
- How her work as a sociologist intersects with her work as a fiction writer in its concerns
with the narratives we tell ourselves and how she’s rethinking the traditional writer’s
workshop 0:45 - The development of her first novel, The Wondrous Woo and magic realism as a political
choice 5:03 - Moving beyond stereotypes about multiculturalism in her story collection That Time I Loved You 9:32
- How cross-stitching helped keep her creative and connected during the pandemic 15:00
- Imagining the apocalypse through the eyes of a raccoon in her new novel The After 18:26
- Asking a group of middle school students to pinpoint the moment when they no longer felt like children and the care that fostered between participants. 21:02
You can find Carrianne ’s work here: The Wondrous Woo https://www.inanna.ca/product/wondrous-woo/That Time I Loved You https://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443452861/that-time-i-loved-you/
The music you heard on this episode was composed by Amadeo Ventura. You can hear more of his music at amadeoventura.weebly.com.
Visit TNQ.ca to access more of Carrianne Leung’s writing and teaching tips, including web extras about mentorship and cultural appropriation. If you like our podcast, please leave a review — it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!
Guest bio:
Carrianne Leung is a fiction writer and educator. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Equity Studies from OISE/University of Toronto. Her debut novel, The Wondrous Woo, published by Inanna Publications was shortlisted for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. Her collection of linked stories, That Time I Loved You, was released in 2018 by HarperCollins and in 2019 in the US by Liveright Publishing. It received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, and was named as one of the Best Books of 2018 by CBC, That Time I Loved You was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards 2019, long listed for Canada Reads 2019 and was awarded the Danuta Gleed Literary Award 2019. Leung’s work has also appeared in the Puritan, Ricepaper, the Globe and Mail, Room, Prairie Fire and Open Book Ontario. Her third book titled, The After, will be released by Harper Collins Canada in 2022. She is currently faculty at the MFA program at the University of Guelph, where she teaches a course called “Decolonial Fiction.” Recommended reading: Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez
"I think with a poem, you always want to have something at stake that you just are not going to be able to answer, but you keep trying to get at it in this way, in that way, in this way."In this episode, Sheryda Warrener explores how poems anchor us in the world, the importance of making space for ritual, and how her students build material from sensory experience.
She discusses:
· Teaching English to children and adults in Japan and Sweden, and how the experiences shaped her as a writer and educator (0:50)
· Wandering the aisles of Home Hardware looking at form in the world and other student-led field trips in her Hybrid Forms class (6:13)
· Using the voice of a Russian cosmonaut in her collection Floating is Everything to explore shifts in perspective and the tension between delight and grief (12:03)
· Looking at visual art as a practice and a process and how it informs her new manuscript (16:52)
· Finding her footing in the 200-person lecture hall and using Window Swap as a way to explore outer and inner landscapes (19:40)
Guest Bio:
Sheryda Warrener is the author of two poetry collections: Hard Feelings (Snare, 2010) and Floating is Everything (Nightwood, 2015). Her work can be found in Event, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Hazlitt, and The Believer, among others. She is a recipient of The Puritan’s Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for poetry, and recent poems have been selected for Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21stCentury Canadian Poetry. She teaches courses in hybrid forms, and poem-making.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly Magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more information and recommended readings from Sheryda Warrener, at:
tnq.ca/parallel
"Writing is something that I really come at as a writer. And I think, like many writers, we all bring our, our lenses to what we write. Science--now I'm realizing more and more—it's a language, it's an entire language. Which, of course, has a culture associated with it as all languages do. And I bring that language and culture to my writing"In this episode, Madhur Anand challenges the divide between art and science and proposes new structures for writing, informed by the natural world.
She discusses:
- Her Governor-General-Award-Winning memoirThis Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart and taking on the voice of her own parents (1:06)
- The turbulent history of Partition and how it influenced her family history and also the structure and style of the memoir (6:29)
- Telling many stories at once—“Aapbeeti or jag beeti?” My story or the story of the world? (7:50)
- Using constraints in both scientific inquiry and writing (11:05)
- Helping students move beyond superficial editing to actually re-vision their drafts (12:40)
- How both studying science and reading poetry can increase our empathy (15:47)
Guest bio:
Dr. MadhurAnandis the author of the experimental memoirThis Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, the poetry collection A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, and several other literary works published in national and international literary magazines. She is a professor of ecology and sustainability at the University of Guelph, where she was appointed the inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly Magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
The music you heard in this episode was composed by Amadeo Ventura. You can hear more of his music at amadeoventura.weebly.com.
Visit TNQ.ca to access more of Madhur Anand’swriting and teaching tips, including web extras about accessibility in CanLit andher tips for teaching online. If you like our podcast, please leave a review—it really helps other listeners find our show! Thank you!
"I talk about speculative fiction in particular, as theory given characters and taken form. And so, rather than it just being like a theoretic concept out there somewhere, it becomes this very specific—here's a character that embodies this theory. Here's a world that embodies this theory. And then we play it out."
In this episode, Derek Newman-Stille discusses breaking down the classroom hierarchy, disrupting fairy tales, and the need for Disability Arts.
They discuss:
- Getting “a-ha!” moments through arts-based research, and sharing research insights in the public sphere (0:58)
- Moving past CanLit’s attachment to realism and creating a community for speculative writing through Speculating Canada, a digital humanities hub (4:55)
- Their Frankenstein fiction anthology We Shall Be Monsters and examining ways we project horror in an ableist society. (6:30)
- Helping students develop speculative worlds using the diversity of nature on planet Earth—including Birds of Paradise! (9:14)
- Creating contemporary fairytales that make space for marginalized identities in their collection Whispers Between Fairies (13:00)
- Recognizing Disability Arts as part of creating a disability community and increasing accessibility (18:08)
Guest Bio:
Derek Newman-Stille is a PhD student at the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies at Trent University. Derek is a Queer, Nonbinary, Disabled activist, artist, author, and editor. They edited the two collections Over the Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales from the Margins (Exile) and We Shall Be Monsters (Renaissance Press) and they have a story in the all disabled collection Nothing Without Us (Renaissance Press). Their art has been featured in Lackington's Magazine and Postscripts to Darkness. Derek runs the 9 time Aurora Award winning digital humanities site Speculating Canada and the site Dis(Abled) Embodiment. Derek researches Canadian Urban Dark Fantasy and the use of the symbol of the monster for exploring the representation of disability issues. Derek is an artist of many mediums and their visual arts can be seen at www.dereknewmanstille.ca.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly Magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more free writing and teaching tips at:
tnq.ca/parallel
“When I think about teachers as gatekeepers, I think deeply about privilege and what our access to information and knowledge looks like. I recall a lot of the opportunities that have been offered to me came from a teacher just paying attention. And so when I think of gatekeeping at that smaller scale, it's also the teacher needing to pay attention to that and to open the door and say, 'Hey, you. You can come into the space. It's totally fine.’”
In this episode, Chelene Knight discusses creating new containers for learning and how she’s shaping CanLit as a writer, editor, and agent.
- 0:41 | Her focus on creative sustainability through industry transparency, wellness and care, and process-building at The Forever Writers Club through Breathing Space Creative.
- 4:33 | Writing in hybrid forms and the development of Dear Current Occupant
- 8:00 | Becoming a literary agent and creating ethical boundaries
- 11:35 | Her exercise “Be the Observer” and how it can help overcome writer’s block
- 13:22 | Bringing the community of Hogan’s Alley to life on the page in her forthcoming novel Junie
Guest Bio:
Chelene Knight is the author of Braided Skinand the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award, and long-listed for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Her essays have appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, and the Toronto Star. Her work is anthologized in Making Room, Love Me True, Sustenance, The Summer Book, and Black Writers Matter, winner of the 2020 Saskatchewan Book Award.
Knight was the previous managing editor at Room magazine and the previous festival director for the Growing Room Festival in Vancouver. She is now CEO of her own literary studio, Breathing Space Creativeand she works as an associate literary agent with Transatlantic Agency. Chelene teaches part-time at the University of Toronto.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly Magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more free writing and teaching tips at:
tnq.ca/parallel
“My own background in physics has taught me wonder. As a poet, we deal mostly in metaphors and a metaphor says that this is that - that's what equations do too. Equations say that mass is energy. Just being able to throw yourself at the universe and find out everything you can is a great background for a scientist or for an artist.”
In this episode, Erin Bow discusses the lightning bolt of inspiration and balancing writing, teaching and science translation. She discusses:
- 1:57 | Her advice for young writers
- 2:56 | Writing the books that “young me really needed to read,” including her Governor General’s Award-winning book Stand on the Sky
- 7:06 | Drawing lines about which stories to write
- 8:56 | Getting kids on their feet during school visits
- 12:51 | How studying physics has enriched her artistic practice…and the mystery of where gold comes from
Guest Bio:
Erin Bow is an award-winning poet and novelist, whose honors include the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the CBC Literary Award for poetry, and a Governor General’s Award. Though trained as a physicist, Erin Bow is now a poet and children’s writer, working out of her garden shed in Kitchener, Ontario.
She is the author of five novels for young adults: The fantasies Plain Kate and Sorrow’s Knot, and the genre-bending duology, The Scorpion Rules, and The Swan Riders, and Stand on the Sky. All her books will make you cry on the bus.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly Magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more free writing and teaching tips from Erin Bow at:
tnq.ca/parallel
“Many people have lifted me up and have given me a helping hand in my career and I wouldn't be here without them. And so the more I can do to pull up the next generation, the more I will do. And that's what teaching is all about.”
In this episode, Kathy Friedman discusses offering students choice and control in the classroom. She discusses:
- 0:27 | Building Mad literary arts and Inkwell Workshops
- 3:09 | Being trauma-informed and making participants feel seen
- 5:57 | Her forthcoming collection All the Shining People and exploring Jewish South African identity during and after apartheid
- 11:18 | Teaching with objects and the importance of brainstorming
- 13:46 | The power of bringing your own vulnerabilities into the classroom
Guest Bio:
Kathy Friedman’s writing has appeared in literary magazines including The New Quarterly, PRISM international, Grain, Geist, Room, Canadian Notes & Queries, Humber Literary Review, and This Magazine. She has been a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, runner-up for the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and PRISM International’s short fiction contest, and was nominated by PRISM for the Journey Prize. Kathy has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and a BFA in Creative Writing from UBC. She teaches creative writing in the University of Guelph’s department of Open Learning.
Kathy is the co-founder and artistic director of InkWell Workshops, which delivers free creative writing workshops to people with mental health and addiction issues. She is the publisher of four literary anthologies with their in-house imprint, InkWell Books.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly Magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more free writing and teaching tips from Kathy Friedman at:
tnq.ca/parallel
“For me, poetry is really where my heart lives. And the reason why these poems are maybe such short emotional bursts is because that's how my heart functions. I definitely know I'm not a super technical poet. I'm not a structural form poet. My poetry is just me heart-speaking. And that's it. And that's all I want it to be. And that's all it needs to be.”
In this episode, Francine Cunningham discusses giving people permission to write their own stories. She discusses:
- 0:32 | Working with youth who feel disconnected from their own culture
- 2:21 | Giving adults permission to be creative
- 4:55 | The development of her award-winning collection On/Me and what it’s like to write an encyclopedia of the self
- 8:12 | Why it’s important to keep some stories for yourself and your community
- 9:48 | What we notice when we stop constantly trying to be productive
- 12:27 | Her exercise “Words Matter” and the five essential questions to ask yourself when you’re writing
Guest Bio:
Francine Cunningham is an award-winning Indigenous writer, artist, and educator originally from Calgary, AB but who currently resides in Vancouver, BC. She is a graduate of the UBC Creative Writing MFA program and a recent winner of The Indigenous Voices Award in the 2019 Unpublished Prose Category and of The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award.
Her fiction has appeared in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, Joyland Magazine, The Puritan Magazine, and more. Her debut book of poetry is titled On/Me (Caitlin Press).
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach. Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly Magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more free writing and teaching tips from Francine Cunningham at:
tnq.ca/parallel
“If you're going to walk into any room and do any kind of presentation, you just want to assume that people are really happy that you're there. You bring more of yourself. You're less focused on your content and more interested in who's in the room and what they might need. You go from rigid to fluid.”
Farzana Doctor discusses how her career as a psychotherapist informs her writing and teaching practices. In this episode, she discusses:
- 02:14 | The lightning bolt of inspiration that helped her revise her novel All Inclusive
- 03:53 | Being respectful when writing about real-world events, such as the Air India bombing
- 06:40 | How her activism sparked her most recent novel, Seven, a multi-generational story dealing with the impact of khatna in the Dawoodi Bohra community
- 08:54 | Self-care for writers both while creating new work and while promoting it
- 13:05 | Techniques for silencing your inner critic
- 15:20 | Facilitating constructive peer feedback
Guest Bio:
Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and psychotherapist. From 2009-18, she curated the Brockton Writers Series and has been a volunteer with The Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Trust. She currently volunteers with WeSpeakOut, a global group that is working to ban female genital cutting in her Dawoodi Bohra community.
She has been writing all of her life but it became a more regular practice around 2000, when she began writing her first novel, Stealing Nasreen, which was published by Inanna in 2007. Her second novel, Six Metres of Pavement, won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award and was short-listed for the 2012 Toronto Book Award. In 2017 it was voted the One Book One Brampton 2017 winner. Her third novel, All Inclusive was a Kobo 2015 and National Post Best Book of the Year.
She's just completed a novel, Seven (August 2020, Dundurn), and a poetry collection, You Still Look the Same. She is currently at work on a YA novel.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more free writing and teaching tips from Farzana Doctor at:tnq.ca/parallel
“I think the idea of an emerging writer only being someone barely emerged from puberty is a problem. Some 25% of Canada is over 65. Where are our first time senior writers? The only senior writers we see are people who have had a long career. Who started in their thirties. And some of that is fueled by capitalism. I've had agents look me in the eye and say, ‘You know, you're a fabulous writer. You're as good a writer as anyone I represent, but I'm just not going to take you on because I don't think you have five books left in you.’”
Dorothy Ellen Palmer shares her thoughts on the opportunities that the pandemic presents for advancing disability justice. In this episode, she discusses:
- 00:01 | Ageism in Can Lit
- 03:35 | Sensitivity readings…and how to kill someone with a walker
- 05:05 | Ethical representation of disabled characters by abled authors
- 10:27 | What inspired her books When Fenlon Falls and Falling for Myself: A Memoir
- 13:48 | How to teach character development with her exercise “Pass the Pudding”
- 15:35 | The importance of combining activism with an artistic practice
Guest Bio:
Dorothy Ellen Palmer is a disabled senior writer, accessibility consultant, and retired high school drama teacher and union activist. For three decades, she worked in three provinces as a high school English/Drama teacher, teaching on a Mennonite Colony, a four-room schoolhouse, an adult learning centre attached to a prison and a highly diverse new high school in Pickering. Elected to her union executive each year for fifteen years, she created staff and student workshops to fight bullying, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and homophobia.
Dorothy sits on the Accessibility Advisory Board of the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) and is an executive board member for the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs (CCWWP) where she writes a monthly column on disability in CanLit for the newsletter.
Her work has appeared in: REFUSE, Wordgathering, Alt-Minds, All Lit Up, Don't Talk to Me About Love, Little Fiction Big Truths, 49th Shelf and Open Book. Her first novel, When Fenelon Falls, features a disabled teen protagonist in the Woodstock-Moonwalk summer of 1969. She lives in Burlington, Ontario, and can always be found tweeting @depalm.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more writing and teaching tips from Dorothy Ellen Palmer at:tnq.ca/parallel
“When someone commits to being an artist of any kind, they are also committing to a lifelong process of learning. I want to always be a student of the craft of writing, even when my job is to teach it. As Mr. Miyagi told Daniel in The Karate Kid, someone always knows more karate. And I want to learn all the karate I can when it comes to writing poetry.”
Paul Vermeersch discusses how, to become an artist, you must commit to a life-long process of learning. In this episode, he discusses:
- 00:40 | His recent collection Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020
- 02:08 | The optimism of the atomic age and our current fixation with dystopia
- 08:26 | Helping students expand their work past preconceived boundaries of poetic form
- 11:44 | Ekphrastic poetry and its pitfalls
- 13:38 | Teaching a course on Self-Publishing at Sheridan College
- 17:10 | How literature can help shape the future
Guest Bio:
Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, creative writing professor, and literary editor. He is the author of several poetry collections, including the Trillium–award nominated The Reinvention of the Human Handand, most recently, Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General's Gold Medal. He teaches in the Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College and is the founding editor of Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd. He lives in Toronto.
About the Podcast:
Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more writing and teaching tips from Paul Vermeerch at:tnq.ca/parallel
“Am I doing enough? I mean, with the new generations of students, everybody's plugged in and knowledge is out there. So in the classroom, what are they actually coming to learn from me? What am I giving them?”
Lamees Al Ethari questions how to know when you’re doing enough as a teacher and a writer. In this episode, she discusses:
- 00:30 | Developing diverse course reading lists and the impact of representation on students
- 02:39 | The development of her memoir Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir and her poetry collection, From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris
- 05:13 | Writing about the trauma of war and the challenges of an audience that has no experience with it
- 08:26 | Using constraints in group work and preparing students to give feedback
- 09:20 | Her experience working on The X Page: A Storytelling Workshopand helping writers find their voice in a second language
- 10:43 | How who she writes for has shifted over time
Guest Bio:
Lamees Al Ethari holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Waterloo, where she has been teaching creative and academic writing since 2015. She has published a collection of poems titled From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris (2018) and, more recently, a memoir titled Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir (2019). Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, The New Quarterly, The Malpais Review, and the anthology Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. She is a Nonfiction Editor with The New Quarterly and a co-coordinator for The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop for Refugee and Immigrant Women.
About the Podcast:Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Access more writing and teaching tips from Lamees Al Ethari at:tnq.ca/episode-1-lamees-al-ethari
About the Podcast:Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.
Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.
Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.
Credits:
Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.
Learn more about the podcast at:tnq.ca/parallel